there’s an amusing crisis being experienced right now by both young and old conservatively minded fellows regarding the meaning of the metaphors ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, and where it begins is at the fundamentally flawed premise that biological, social and political evolution is not a continuum, but processes that reach, and have, for relatively short duration, ‘ideal’ states which express the ‘proper’ way the species man should be and conduct himself. these conservatively minded fellows, who are part romantic sentimentalists, part intellectual handicap, compare the present age to some long gone historical age, and then judge the current model by the standards of the old model. really there is no substance to any of this, and it shows only an overly emotional reaction to changing social circumstances in which they feel very, very uncomfortable (it’s not ironic that this reaction is rather feminine by their own standards).
let me explain in a few words what could be explained in many. an analogy; if a tree dwelling monkey-like human ancestor could talk, he’d say of the upright bipedal hominids that evolved from him who fight with primitive weaponry instead of beating each other with their fists, that they were ‘feminized’, because they adopted a better and easier ESS (evolutionarily stable strategy).
now i want you to try this. pretend you’re a teenage transgalactic alien who is given a homework assignment to write a comprehensive report about what the human species’ concepts of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ mean, and as a study guide you are given a record of the evolution of the human species on earth spanning a fifty thousand year period. during this period you are able to witness several major biological, social and political changes happening of/for the species. you see the ancient world where men were barbarians and warriors… and then thousands of years later you see a modern world in which men are slender, cybernetically interfaced beings who don’t curse, dressed in tight neon purple spandex with soft little hands that spend eighty percent of their time interacting with some kind of computer technology. you immediately notice how different this modern version of men are from the ancient version of men, and yet you must come up with a definition of what ‘masculine’ means. what do you do? what do you have to reference to get the ‘proper’ definition? you find that the very meaning of ‘masculine’ as it is understood by this modern version is almost unrecognizable when compared to what it meant to the older version. so what the fuck are you going to do? you can’t just forget the assignment and instead go hang out at the virtual-reality arcade with the other shadowrun crypto-punks, because you’ll get in trouble a lose seventeen credits… and you don’t want to do that.
i’ll tell you what you do, and how you get an A on this assignment. you explain how the evolutionarily change of the species, and particularly the social roles of the genders, is a process that is ecologically and ergonomically synchronized with the changes of the socio-economic structures that emerge from the material relations the species is involved in. you explain that there is no such stable definitions of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, and that these are just metaphors used to describe contingent behaviors that exist for the genders during any specific period of time as the entire organism, the whole ecology of the species and environment in its symbiotic relationship, adjusts and changes to adopt better ESSs.
and for extra credit you can write an essay about how conservative males who failed to understand evolution, much less adapt to it, rationalized there erroneous notion not only by claiming there was some stage in this evolutionary process that was ‘golden’ or ‘proper’ or ‘right’, in which men were ‘real men’, but by also claiming that the forces responsible for changing the ‘real men’ into ‘feminized men’ were conspiratorial, and not just natural mechanisms functioning during this ongoing ecological interaction between human beings and their material environments.
you could explain how billy bob who could operate a tractor and throw a mean left hook was, in the period and context in which he existed, properly suited for adapting to a role that was conducive to his personal survival as well as making him a productive member of a society in which such technologies existed… just like you would explain how corellius doranium, the roman gladiator, was the same in his environment… just like you would explain how jaden #356, who works for kamatuzo incorporated building nano-hardrives and eats a block of nutritionally enhanced green gelatin for lunch everyday, was the same in his environment.
in this report you’re going to explain how the concepts of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ were made up by the people who existed at each stage, and used to describe in general the kinds of roles, cultural practices, habits, behavior patterns and mannerisms (x), each of the genders were identified with at that particular time.
finally you can add a short satire in which you pretend to be one such short-sighted human who is clueless concerning the dynamics of evolution, and act terrified by the thought of x changing for the next generation of males and females … something that the overseers are engineering themselves for whatever reason. you can even pretend that they’re doing it because ‘strong males’ are a threat and need to be made manageable. lol, as if the very notion of what a ‘strong male’ was wasn’t itself just another engineered commodified identity by the forces that control the dominating socio-political narratives of the day. all you gotta do is print a few thor posters and publish a few evola essays and wah-lah… you’ve got an audience of disenfranchised males who feel like males again. fuck it, you could even totally reverse the semiotic trends and raise young males on barbie dolls and my little pony, tell them this is masculine, and presto. every bit of this is subject to constructivist forces; roles, identities, can be completely manufactured and have very, very little to do with biology. if you got kid with high testosterone levels, he’ll only exhibit more energy in playing with his barbie dolls and my little ponies… but he won’t stop playing with them, because he’s been conditioned to believe this is masculine… and he’s been conditioned to believe that he should want to be masculine.
the fact is, there are gonads and there are ovaries. this is what it means to be male and female. everything else about you, you bought somewhere, or bought into somewhere in some shit you read. in the LONG RUN, all these attributes and characteristics you define as ‘masculine’ traits - aggressiveness, apathy, competitiveness, etc. - are simply behaviors that the ones with gonads happened to have during a period in which those characteristics were contextually appropriate and successful for sustaining a contrived social role that evolved within and from the material relations in society. once those structures change, x will no longer be appropriate, and the ones with gonads will start doing other shit that now is appropriate, that now ‘works’.
now i should say that if this matter wasn’t so simple it might be more interesting… but alas, it is not. what’s interesting, as a good study of social phenomena, is how desperately some males cling to this completely imaginary problem. i imagine it’s just a kind of weberian ‘in-group’ camaraderie shared by mutually inclusive depressives… and don’t get me wrong; i love to wrestle and fart and make snide sexual comments about women and drink beer and watch 300 over and over and over and over again, but i never felt disappointed or threatened by the thought of a world of skinny, coldplay listening-to millennials growing up without a single curse word in their vocabulary and not the slightest interest in the alaskan truckers mini series on the history channel. that’s their business. couldn’t care less.
okay so say this with me. we’re going to say it a few times cuz i want to get it in there, down deep into the grey matter of your mainframe:
there is no ‘right’ way in nature, no ‘ideal’, only ‘different’ ways
again
there is no ‘right’ way in nature, no ‘ideal’, only ‘different’ ways
again
there is no ‘right’ way in nature, no ‘ideal’ only ‘different’ ways
AGAIN
there is no ‘right’ way in nature, no ‘ideal’, only ‘different’ ways